The Facebook Stories function that was initially launched in March this year now supports public sharing, creating a new competitor to the similar Instagram and Snapchat Stories features.

Previously, Facebook users could only share their Stories - compilations of images or short video clips - with people they were directly connected with via the social media platform, but it was noticed that the sharing settings had changed in recent weeks and that public sharing was now enabled.

Speaking to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Facebook confirmed: "This is something we rolled out a few weeks ago. The public setting allows your followers to see your story, in addition to your friends."

Although they said there is no specific timeline for rolling this public sharing function out to brand pages for their Stories yet, it could have the potential to transform the way that they create and share content in the future.

Facebook has significantly more daily active users than Snapchat - 1.3 billion versus 166 million - so it will certainly be interesting to see how its now-public Stories feature fares in comparison.